On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 4:52 AM, John A. Grahor <j...@techma.com> wrote: > I'd like a terminal emulator that has a "dumb" terminal mode, i.e. where > line editing can happen locally and what one types is only sent to the tty > when one hits return (or some other key).
Two decades ago I fell in love with Apollo Computer's solution to this problem. A terminal window was broken into two "panes": 1) an editable input pane 2) a read-only transcript pane The two panes were separated by a full window horizontal line or rule. The input pane never shrank to less than one line but could also steal lines from the transcript pane until it grew to a specified fraction of the input window (typically 1/4). The input pane had two modes of operation with an icon on the title bar to indicating which mode was in effect. I cannot recall the actual names so let me just call them "connected mode" and "disconnected mode". In In connected mode type ahead hung around in the input pane until a program running in under that terminal window issued a read from stdin. When that happened a single line of input (i.e. up to a newline) was passed from the input pane to the requesting program. That input line disappeared from the input pane, the program's prompt (if any) appeared in the transcript followed by the input line just delivered. In essence the input pane was simply a visible representation of unconsumed type-ahead. In disconnected mode type ahead input again hung around in the input pane. This time though when a program running in the terminal window requested input its prompt would appear in the transcript pane but no user supplied input would be delivered until the input pane reverted to connected mode. At that point the oldest input line would disappear from the input pane and would reappear following the prompt in the transcript pane. What made this mechanism so pleasant to use was that all text areas in the screen (editing buffers, input panes, and output transcripts) shared a common set of editing key bindings, similar to vi or emacs. A very common idiom was to list a directory, switch the input pane to disconnected mode, copy the directory listing to the input pane, modify that copy of the listing using some regular expression substitutions to turn it into one or more commands on each file, and revert the input pane to connected mode. Obviously in any *nix environment one can do the same thing by redirecting the output from ls to a file, open that file in an editor, modifying it, saving it, and finally sourcing the edited file in one's shell. The input pane mechanism simply made such operations faster and more intuitive: no inventing a file name, no opening a separate editor, no issuing a source command to one's shell. /john
